Exclusive: Ted Hughes’s poem on the night Sylvia Plath died

The New Statesman publishes a previously unseen work by the late poet laureate.

The New Statesman publishes a previously unseen work by the late poet laureate.

In tomorrow's New Statesman, which has been guest-edited by Melvyn Bragg, we publish a previously unseen poem by Ted Hughes. "Last letter" is a poem that describes what happened during the three days leading up to the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Its first line is: "What happened that night? Your final night." -- and the poem ends with the moment Hughes is informed of his wife's death.

Hughes's best-known work is 1998's Birthday Letters, a collection of poems that detail his relationship with Plath. Though the published poems make reference to Plath's suicide, which occurred in February 1963, when she and Hughes were separated but still married, none of them addresses directly the circumstances of her death. This, then, would appear to be the "missing link" in the sequence.

The earliest draft of "Last letter" held in the British Library's Ted Hughes archive appears in a blue school-style exercise book, which is believed to date from the 1970s. The book contains drafts of several poems that appear in Birthday Letters. A more refined draft of the poem is found in a hardback notebook. After drafting poems by hand several times, Hughes would usually type out poems when they were near completion, adding notes in the margin where necessary.

Below are images from various drafts of the poem:

Add. 88918/1/6, f.1

The image above is of the first page of the earliest known draft of the poem, which went through many revisions before the final version appeared

2010+40ted poem 2

The image above is the first page of a later draft of the poem (date unknown)

Add. 88918/1/8, f.11

This image is from a draft of the poem contained in a hardback notebook. As is evident, Hughes would extensively rework phrases and add lines throughout the various stages of drafting. When a poem was finished, he would usually type it out, annotating with comments where necessary

In a letter from 1998 to his fellow poet Seamus Heaney, Hughes says that he first started to write simple verse "letters" to Sylvia Plath in the early 1970s. Hughes began writing them piecemeal; later he tried to do it in a more concerted way but found that he couldn't, so he went back to writing them occasionally. Some of the Birthday Letters poems appear in the 1995 New Selected Poems, but in correspondence with friends (also held by the British Library), he says he had found some of the other poems too personal to publish at that time.

Tonight Channel 4 News covered the story and recruited the actor Jonathan Pryce to read a section from the poem.

To read the poem in full, pick up a copy of Thursday's magazine.

Daniel Trilling is the Editor of New Humanist magazine. He was formerly an Assistant Editor at the New Statesman.

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Brief Encounters is warm and joyful – but no-one in Sheffield calls it "dinner"

If the program is full of misplaced nostalgia, I'm still powerless to resist its charms. Plus: Forces of Nature With Brian Cox reviewed.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I fell, somewhat embarrassingly, for Brief Encounters (Mondays, 9pm), ITV’s new comedy drama about naughty knicker parties in the early Eighties. In the upstairs bedroom of her “posh” detached house in Sheffield, Pauline (Penelope Wilton) was telling her cleaner, Steph (Sophie Rundle), that her butcher husband, Brian (Peter Wight), had received “the nod” from the local Rotary club. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was on about; as far as I know, the Rotarians aren’t some Freemason-style secret society. But something in her tone – perhaps there was a touch of Alan Bennett about it – caught my attention. That’s when it happened. Moving across the great expanse of fitted carpet, she arrived at a fitted wardrobe the size of a small branch of Tesco. “Brian can get through three shirts in a day,” she announced, coat hangers in hand. “I think it must be to do with working with meat.”

I realise that Brief Encounters is basically knickers. An Aldi version of The Full Monty, it arrives on our screens with every cliché of character and plot intact. But my heart is simply not up to the job of resisting it. For one thing, there is the adorable Wilton, giving her all to the part of Pauline, a bored and lonely housewife who is about to find boundless hope at the bottom of a box of mauve negligees – and sod what her sententious neighbour Bunny Matlock (Pippa Haywood) thinks.

For another, not only is it set in Sheffield, my home town, but it seems to have been filmed largely in Crookes, the suburb immortalised by the Human League and Jarvis Cocker. As I watched, I felt kind of funny. It was in these streets – the steep hills lined with millstone grit terraces and bounded by open countryside – that my beloved granny lived and to which, when I was a small girl, my father retreated with the woman who became my stepmother.

Because of this insider knowledge, I noticed the mistakes, and they annoyed me. Brian the butcher would not have called his evening meal “dinner” and Steph, the cleaner who hopes to earn some much-needed extra cash by throwing knicker parties, is perplexingly well spoken. The series, written by Fay Rusling and Oriane Messina, also makes much of how, when she first decides to become an Ann Summers representative, she is so prudish that she can barely bring herself to touch a sock-style “marital aid” (use your imagination), let alone the cucumber-sized baton that is the Stallion vibrator.

Really? I don’t think so. In 1984 I had a job in a Sheffield branch of Boots and all anyone talked about as they piled up the Pampers and wrote down the names of the codeine addicts was sex. I got quite an education. As for the scene in which Pauline’s hairdresser, Dawn (Sharon Rooney), ended up eating her client’s potpourri, believing it was a party nibble . . . What next? Is Bunny Matlock going to mistake a plate of mushy peas for guacamole? Oh, but I forgot. Faced with the buzzing, jerking Stallion, she thought she was looking at a food blender.

The trouble is that it’s all so warm-hearted. Even if you don’t believe in their sexual awakening, you want these women to succeed. Plus, Toni Basil and Ultravox are on the soundtrack. For some of us, this is seductive. The Eighties weren’t better times than these; 1982 was a tough year, whether you owned a dry-clean-only sexy maid outfit or not. But given what we’re going through right now, we can be forgiven for a bit of misplaced nostalgia.

I certainly prefer misplaced nostalgia – and simple minds – to Brian Cox, whose smooth and gormless face is back on BBC1. His new series, Forces of Nature With Brian Cox (Mondays, 9pm), is about the laws that govern the natural world, a realm that is, as the Alain de Botton of physics says, ­reporting from various exotic locations, beautiful and complex.

What is not beautiful and complex is his way with words. Who can bear it? Not me. Even those of us who flunked CSE physics grasp that the “force of gravity is unrelenting”. Forget D:Ream. This is “Dumb Britain: the World Tour”. 

Rachel Cooke trained as a reporter on The Sunday Times. She is now a writer at The Observer. In the 2006 British Press Awards, she was named Interviewer of the Year.

This article first appeared in the 07 July 2016 issue of the New Statesman, The Brexit bunglers